…and the score of other bloggers who came before me and said everything good, right, and interesting *I* was about to say. No, really, I was. Except now I can’t and you’ll never know, because they already did and I can’t possibly copy what anyone else said. /ragequit

GRRRRR!

Okay, I lied. No /ragequit. Because that’s partly the point of community for me, especially the gaming community but probably, to be honest, any community that’s passionate about whatever it is it’s passionate about — we all share this gestalt mind that pursues the same subjects at the same time and says very similar things. And subjects come around again every so often (in my case, Solo vs. Grouping and Why Dungeons Are Horrible), get hotly debated, and then die back down for six months or a year.

For a while — which coincided with me not blogging a whole lot, so the past 2-3 years or so — I wasn’t so sure, but now I think this is A Good Thing™. I started this blog back in 2008 and for a very short while it was going to be a blog just about Warhammer Online, because that’s what I was involved in when I started it. It’s all the fault of Casualties of War, you see (and they appear to be a casualty of the internet because the forums have either moved or are no more) — a bunch of people I met online and don’t even remember how I met, because that’s the cool thing about gaming: you meet people all the time while playing games and while many of them fall by the wayside, a not-inconsiderable number of them end up sticking as acquaintances, friends, possibly RL friends and sometimes even spouses.

Casualties of War – Warhammer Online group shot

I am now RL-friends (and neighbours, as it happens) with people I met in Asheron’s Call almost 15 years ago, not to mention having changed continents in order to get married to one of those met-in-an-MMO people. Back then it was weird, and people kept telling me I was going to meet axe-murderers; it’s not so unusual these days (meeting people online – not meeting axe-murderers). So I probably met someone in Casualties through someone I knew who knew someone who knew someone who was involved. And Casualties was chock-full of blogging types who encouraged the rest of us to try it out, and many of us did, and most of our blogs went from “this will only ever be about Warhammer, I swear!” to “games rock! let’s talk more about games!”, which is entirely predictable given that most gamers are passionate about more than a single game.

I’m not sure where I’m going with this, because I’ve lost the blogging habit these last couple of years and anything other than stream-of-consciousness is hard work. But at some point — and many bloggers have encountered the same thing — I felt as though I’d said most of what I needed to say, that others were saying it much more cogently and with a fresher perspective anyway, and that I was just rehashing stuff nobody would care about. So I stopped writing, and told myself it was because life had become very busy (which it had) and I had many other things to do (which I did) — but when you’re passionate about something, you find time for it no matter what. That guy who never calls you back because he’s ‘too busy’? He didn’t want to call you in the first place. We make time for the things we care about.

Kittens make every post 837% better. True fact.

And I care about gaming, so here I am. I’ve always stated that I blog primarily for myself — and I do, which freed me from caring about how many people clicked this or how many people commented on that (though the stats are kind of fun and the positive attention is freakingawesome, especially when it’s from people I admire). But blogging for myself doesn’t mean I’m not part of a community of other people who blog about games and a whole host more people who read blogs about games. And yes, we’re terribly incestuous. We share ideas, we all post about the same thing pretty much at the same time, we have storms in teacups and get our knickers in a twist and make up and write posts about how awesome the gaming and game-blogging community is. Because it is.

Because despite (or perhaps because of) being an introvert I can connect, whenever I want and to whatever extent I find comfortable, with folks on blogs and all the other social media out there now. We all have different lives, we all have daily triumphs and tragedies and challenges, and although we don’t necessarily talk about them (though I find I share that stuff a bit more nowadays than I used to, and it can be a comfort), we share a bond that somehow makes life a little better. Because we’re passionate about that one thing. It can lower barriers and build bridges between people who otherwise wouldn’t acknowledge each other in the street, for whatever political, religious or cultural reason. It’s not a panacea, but it is A Good Thing. And whether it’s reading blogs or writing them or simply making friends through gaming and Twitter and Facebook and MyLifeHasNoPrivacy.com, we should continue doing it.

Every now and then I check various stats on this blog, especially the search terms that bring people here because those are usually worth a laugh. Today, I’m puzzled (among other things) to note that of the top 10 search terms of all time, only 3 are related to games (two, technically, since two of those are variants on the number ’13’); and the top term by far is for a game I only ever wrote ONE post about. A short one at that, linking to an actual post on Gamasutra.

Weird search terms are weird. And people coming here from their searches almost certainly don’t find what they were looking for. That makes me feel a bit better, actually. /Schadenfreude

Just to prove that I’m not lying when I say I’m a perma-noob — I’ve done the quest in the screenshot three times already and NOT ONCE did I notice the 4th ingredient in the top right (the quest doesn’t necessarily use all four possible ingredients). It was only after my druid failed three times to get the ‘glowy’ ingredient that I, puzzled that none of the three ingredients were working, went and checked the quest out on WoWHead.

If I’d been a bit less of a noob I’d have remembered that the previous quest had me gather four ingredients to make that potion with. Duh.

Forget pepper jack, magic jack or lumberjack — all the best people use COMMANDOJACK!

Is it sad that I take a picture of every single garrison building I complete, on every character?

Riding my Shinri “mount” in Shadowmoon Valley. I should have known that was too easy a kill to reward an actual mount (it’s a 10-second directable mount-ride useable only in SMV with a 1-hour cooldown)…

Moonrise, squared (or cubed?).

Mixing our mythoses (mythiii?)…

And my warlock, Memento, made it to 100, but I wasn’t expecting it (as usual) and missed the photo-op.

The Mirage family is on hold until a) they fix the vanishing relationships issue, which I think they may have and/or b) I decide I can handle a legacy which only produces twins and triplets. In a classic case of be careful what you wish for, it seems the karma pixies heard me when I said I wanted to try running several characters at once in a Sims game, horrid creatures that they are.

So I created a new legacy — the de Lyttes — some weeks ago, but what with Thanksgiving here in the US and other life, work and reasons stuff they haven’t been played all that much — and what has occurred has been the rather tedious (and always similar) beginning stage where the founder has nothing much with which to fill up that 50 x 50 lot.

But all of a sudden things did start to happen in the last session, so I’ll go ahead and present the founder and a few pix.

The de Lytte legacy will use the following succession laws: Equality (any gender can inherit), Modern (natural or adopted kids can inherit), and Living Will (the child with the highest friendly relationship with the current pater- or materfamilias inherits). It’s probably one of the easiest sets to pick because it allows for a great deal of choice in terms of heirs — hell, if I were that way inclined I could deliberately play whoever I didn’t want as heir as being horrible to the current head of the family, just to make sure their relationship was anything but friendly. And I may indeed do that, but only if circumstances and personalities make it a viable role-playing choice. I picked that ruleset mostly so that if I do get saddled with a bunch of twins and triplets again, I have more options in terms of which of them inherits. It might make for some interesting mini-stories and rivalries, too. (For those who want an even more mano-a-mano rivalry model, the “Strength” heir law includes an actual scrap to determine who gets to be the next head of household.)

My house rule is that family members must be named after dances. I had a lot of fun with the Mirage family card game names (poor Ratscrew!), and the dance names offer a little more variety while being a little less off-the-wall.

Active Sims love random sit-ups!

As for Samba, she’s Active, a Foodie, and Ambitious, and her aspiration is Renaissance Sim. The first few stages of that aspiration are easy enough to complete but the last one requires 6 skills at level 8 (or something similar) and that’s not easy at all, even for someone like me who loves building Sim-skills. She may be young, but she already knows she’s going places, even if she doesn’t know exactly where those places are. She inherited the lot from her father, Tango de Lytte — he won it in a card game years ago but kept the property as an ace in the hole and never mentioned it to his daughter. Samba’s mother, Tarantella, died when Samba was very young, and Tango disappeared from one day to the next almost a decade ago. (It’s entirely possible he vanished with his best friend and partner in cons, Jimmy Cash…)

Eventually Tango was declared legally dead and Samba discovered she had inherited a rather valuable piece of property in the up-and-coming town of Willow Creek. Having spent several years dodging all the people to whom Tango owed money and favours (sometimes literally, hence the Active trait) and occasionally being helped out by some of Tango’s more savoury friends and acquaintances (hence the Foodie trait), Samba decided that a quiet life in an out of the way part of the country might be exactly what she needed. ‘Quiet’ being a relative term – she doesn’t know what she’ll be yet, but she knows that someday she’ll be famous and so rich she can bathe in Simoleons.

Whatever that career will be, it won’t be as a chef…

Ew!

…which apparently had hygiene requirements Samba wasn’t prepared to follow… or as a writer, which clearly bored Samba to death.

SNORE

What I know and Samba doesn’t is that she’s destined for a career among the stars, though not on the right side of the law – she’s going to end up an Astronaut/Smuggler branch. But that’s a story for another time, and I have some followers to send on missions in WoW.